Naked ambition

Australia's porn film industry is barely there, but that
could be about to change, writes Claire Halliday.

JENNA TAYLIA isn't her real name. But her parents didn't shell
out on that eastern suburbs Catholic girls' school education for
her to end up here, in a motel in Canberra, waiting for her fellow
cast-mates to rouse themselves from sleep and have sex with her on
camera. So she came up with the alias herself  a change that
partitions who she was from who she is about to become.

Not that she imagines her parents will ever see this, her first
porn film. Even on the off chance that someone from her extended
family might one day mail-order a DVD entitled Aussie F---
Fest and recognise her, she doesn't imagine that they would
dare to take the secret to her mother and father.

"They're pretty conservative," Jenna coughs, with a waft of
cigarette smoke and a roll of her eyes. "They have very
old-fashioned values, which is good for some people, but I have
definitely rebelled against it. I was born to do porn."

She offers the last line, after a second or two of silence, with
an affected Californian twang that marks her as someone self-aware
enough to know that, really, she was not born to do this at
all.

Exactly how she came to be here is not immediately clear. She's
a very sexual person, she says. Been doing all sorts of things with
all sorts of people for too many years. Now she's 22 and, despite
the fact that she has had a steady boyfriend "for a whole year",
she decided to turn her hand at stripping three weeks ago. Then
someone at the club asked her to do this.

"In many ways, I would have been more willing to do this than
stripping, really. With that, you have to put up with annoying men
hassling you. This is just having sex on camera," she says.

Scan the world of advertising, reality television, popular music
and the internet and her attitude is hardly shocking. Much has been
made of porn culture's seep into the mainstream and with MySpace
and YouTube capturing the egocentric mood of the moment 
where pieces of people's lives are made accessible, at the touch of
a button, to anyone else online  the transition to porn star
might not be the leap it once was.

With 42.7 per cent of all internet users worldwide viewing
pornography  adding up to 72 million visitors to pornographic
websites each month  the moral majority may well be losing
ground to a new tech-savvy, Big Brother generation for whom
all things private are now, routinely, public .

"I have never thought of porn as a bad thing," Jenna says.

For today, at least, it's an escape from her daily working life
as a disability carer.

"I wipe people's arses and get paid shit money  so now I
do porn on the side." Her hands motion with a manic energy before
settling to cradle her head. "I want to just do this one movie and
see where things go from there. I don't want to be famous for this,
because then people would never care about anything else I might be
able to do. But at the same time, I am not doing a whole lot of
other stuff at the moment."

Lately, in the Australian adult film industry, nobody has been
doing a whole lot of stuff either, something that Maxine Fensom is
keen to change. Fensom, 48, is known to many Melburnians as the
leopard-skinned woman on the billboard hawking naughty
businessmen's lunches. She has recently won the rights to be at the
helm of US porn legend Larry Flynt's foray into Australian
"gentlemen's" club culture (Fensom has recently taken over a
Brunswick strip club that is set to be Hustler-fied) but has never
stripped herself. Now she is stepping sideways into the world of
producing porn films, with her sights on creating a viable industry
and churning out Australian content for international
distribution.

Just why anyone would do all this on camera she can't really
explain but, from a business perspective, she's glad that they
will. And not, she says, because her life is more about money than
it is about morality.

"This is business. I am an empowered female and have made a
business decision to bring my own touch to the porn industry,"
Fensom says. "I am not making anyone do things they don't want to
do."

The idea came during one of her regular business trips to the
US, where adult industry connections introduced her to her
international partners in the Tight Candy Productions venture. When
released in the US  available online or through adult stores
 the finished film, she says, will sell for $US5 ($A5.90). In
the first few weeks, she is hoping to sell "a few thousand" copies,
the first in what she hopes could be a series.

"We will be doing it properly. We're going to implement some
sort of code of ethics  do medical tests, be professional,"
she says, describing the company's logo of a busty kangaroo with
the slogan, "Proudly Australian Laid", with a chuckle. "There isn't
really a porn film industry in Australia."

According to the man known as the Australian "Godfather of
porn", John Lark, it is a move that is long overdue. In sex
industry circles, Lark earned his title  and last year's
Australian Adult Industry Awards lifetime achievement honour 
due to his trail-blazing stint as a porn producer in the late
1980s, when the 20 films he made established local "stars" such as
Canberra's Alice Springs and Kelly Blue.

"I have always been surprised that there is not a locally
organised film industry in Australia, especially as we have a few
main things going for us: legality and locations, not to mention
access to local talent and climate conditions for filming," Lark
says.

Although he talks about legality, the waters are, in fact, a
little muddy.

While the sale of X-rated films is banned in the states and the
Northern Territory, the finer points of the ACT Classification Act
mean that the production, distribution and sale of X-rated films is
possible in the ACT.

The act came into force in 1995, after a parliamentary battle in
which the ACT government refused to follow the states and ban the
sale of X-rated films.

"It requires that anyone undertaking the above apply to the ACT
Office of Fair Trading for a licence. This ($11,000) licence is
annual and payable to the ACT government," Patten says.

Despite the apparent restrictions, she isn't aware of anyone
being prosecuted for producing an adult film in Australia.

TIGHT Candy's call for talent  advertised through a
MySpace website and word of mouth around the Brunswick strip club
 has uncovered an assortment of characters. It's a mix that
soon has tempers fraying. As well as Jenna, there are three other
Melbourne strippers and another woman, pushing 50, who dazzled at
her own audition when, fresh from performing fellatio on a man who
needed help preparing for the scrutiny of the lens, she
nonchalantly reapplied her lipstick and revealed her ambition to be
a children's fiction writer.

In Canberra, her surface willingness to please has already given
way to diva-like demands. In the upstairs motel room, she is
screaming at Fensom for waking her too early.

Then there are the men. On the night of their audition, at
Fensom's club two weeks earlier, the four mates had swaggered in,
ready to prove that, with the help of some internet access and a
girlie magazine, they could do what all male porn stars needed to,
when it was needed.

"It's every male's dream to be in a porn movie," one says. "We
are living the dream."

His alias is Ricky Bennett. With his friends, Blaze Matlock, Ron
Peno and Billy Bulger, he has proven his commitment to the project
by undergoing a series of invasive blood tests and penis probes
 checks for gonorrhoea, HIV, herpes and hepatitis. Now, as
the Canberra afternoon ticks on, the four men wait, armed with the
doctor's certificates, nicotine and some sizeable hangovers.

They arrived late last night, crossing the border in the Britz
vans that have helped nudge the production budget towards the
$20,000 mark.

The US co-producer is Christopher Waters, 39, an articulate,
pony-tailed man who fell into this business two years ago and now
talks of "evolving the paradigm" to lift porn from its former
gutter residence, complete with cleverly plotted business plans and
a belief in freedom of expression.

If Fensom is being driven mad by the lack of motivation from the
cast of porn debutantes, it's Waters' job not to show it. He drifts
from door to door, call sheet in hand, trying to goad everyone back
onto schedule.

In one room, a big-bellied man wearing a baggy T-shirt, black
board shorts and matching socks wedged into khaki thongs swallows
the last of a McDonald's breakfast. He is the US director 
working name, Ryan DiPalma  flown over for today's shoot to
infuse a fledgling industry with the wisdom of the Californian
masters.

He stumbled into directing porn a couple of years ago, he says,
after he got into financial difficulties and answered an ad on an
online job site. He got confirmation of his new career as he was
walking out of bankruptcy court.

"I paid the parking attendant with coins, walked into bankruptcy
and when I walked out I got the call to say I had the job. The way
I live life is as it arises."

As the afternoon wears on, his directorial role sees him
negotiating the rocking movement of the Britz van, script-less,
with a hand-held camera, encouraging the four lads and two young
women sprawled on the mattress in the back into an improvised scene
that labours through all the cliches of an Australiana road trip.
Fensom is in the passenger seat, calling out her own directions to
add good footage for the US market.

"Look at the cockatoos," she says, urging him to turn the camera
from the sexual action and towards some native fauna. "And there's
Parliament."

The gonzo-style Australian-ness of it all is Fensom's predicted
path to success. And according to the Eros Association's Fiona
Patten, who estimates adult DVD sales in Australia are worth $200
million a year, there is money to be had in porn.

"In the US and Europe, they are getting sick of the blonde hair,
big tits talent," Fensom says. They want real people, real
bodies.

As evening falls, the shooting location has gone indoors, to a
strip joint Fensom has hired as the backdrop to the film's main
action. When the editing is done, it will show our four heroes
ending their road trip here  winning the affections of all
manner of "local" lassies.

Being for the US market, though, the real hero is another
visitor Fensom refers to as "stunt cock"  a bespectacled
former film student who used to work as a news cameraman. He was
sacked, he says, after refusing to edit a same-sex kiss out of some
news footage. And so, with his girlfriend at the time, he answered
an online ad and became Dane Cross, porn star. Here in Canberra,
his role is partly to drive plot but, with a CV of more than 50
roles to date, he is also here to guarantee at least one
porn-worthy end result.

While the other Melbourne men drink away their fears, he watches
the unfolding delays and dramas with the sober eye of someone
experiencing just another day on the job.

"If you work hard and take what you are doing seriously, you can
do well," he says. For men working in the business, the money isn't
huge. In the established US industry, Cross says, men earn about a
quarter of the wage offered to women.

"Usually I get $US500," he says. The wage tops up his regular
work  editing films for the same porn company.

He dreams of building a youth hostel in Romania. "I'm not like
most of the other people in this industry," he says.

He likes occasionally finding "a real connection" with a female
co-star and, by the time the others were stretching their legs at
Glenrowan, he was in the van, "connecting" with Jenna.

Now, as DiPalma gets hands-on with one of the female performers
 arranging her splayed legs for the still photos that will
eventually adorn the back cover of the DVD  Jenna and Dane
sit side-by-side in the club's rear dressing room, sharing pizza
from a cardboard box, their forearms resting against each other
with a gentle familiarity.

"Where's Blondie?" DiPalma's boom disturbs any tenderness,
beckoning yet another cast member to the set.

"Blondie" has angel wings tattooed on her shoulder blades and,
within mere seconds, is top-off and pouting.

A trio of club regulars who have been allowed in to help pad out
the crowd scenes munch corn chips while they watch. Ricky Bennett
struts past, drink in hand and points his cigarette towards the
woman before the camera.

"We're going to be f---ing her later," he says.

As the night wears on, though, only one local lad and Dane Cross
will really deliver on cue.

"Next time, there won't be any drinking," Fensom says. "I've got
a better understanding of the psychology behind people who have sex
on camera and next time we can do it even better. Boy/girl,
girl/girl  the Australian touch will sell. The sky's the
limit."

Whether or not Fensom's dreams are realised, only time will
tell. For now, though, she's committed to trying again. And again.
Future production costs will extend to plane tickets for Dane Cross
and a confirmed guest director spot from another US expert 
porn legend Ron Jeremy. Even Jenna Taylia, despite her original
caution, is keen for another credit.

"Some of them are troubled and some of them are kinky, but they
seem to genuinely love sex," Fensom says. "For whatever reason,
they all just want to be porn stars."